Prosodic Markers of Hesitation in the Context of the Determining of the Speaker's Communicative Status

The article deals with the problem of the relationship of prosodic markers of hesitation and the communicative status of the participant in the dialogue. The aim of the work is to show which specific markers of hesitation and under what conditions express the realization of the status of the slave. The material of the study is a dialogue in Russian, in which one of the interlocutors hires the second as a killer. The material under consideration is a spontaneous oral text recorded on audio media. The text was investigated in the framework of linguistic expertise. In the dialogue analyzed, communicative statuses are set by the situation of communication: it is obvious that the customer takes the lead position and the killer - the position of the slave. However, in such a situation, a nontrivial research task is to characterize the specificity of prosodic hesitation markers in the speech of the communicant who is in the slave position. Therefore, the author reviewed the filled pauses and lengthening of sounds in the killer's speech and compared them with similar hesitation markers in the customer's speech. The data obtained during the analysis can be applied in situations in which the communicative status of the participant in the dialogue is not so obvious. Information about the prosody of the text under consideration was obtained using the Speech Analyzer computer program for the analysis of oral speech. This program allows to trace changes in the pitch contour, the intensity of speech, as well as to describe in detail the pauses in the sounding speech. Prosodic markers are considered here in both quantitative and qualitative aspects. Such an analysis involves the establishment of the duration of the pauses, a detailed description of the movement of the tone in the filled pauses, and a listing of the acoustic properties of elongated phoneme realizations. In the course of the study, the author established that the slave's speech contained a larger number of prosodic hesitation markers than the leader's speech. However, they have a number of specific properties. For example, the duration of pauses and elongated sounds is quite diverse, a rather large gap is shown between the values of temporal indicators (0.65; 0.5; 1.1; 0.9; 0.3). Along with a smooth tone, there is an uneven decrease in tone (in two stages), the tone in a vowel can also be upward-downward, and in one case a rugged tonal contour, i.e. some tonal vibrations, is observed. There are elongated constrictive consonants [v], [f], [s], as well as a change of the tonal contour due to the abandonment of the grammatical structure. All these features, apparently, testify to the speaker's emotional instability and some caution when constructing statements, i.e. reflect the status of the slave given by the communicative situation.

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